Wind turbines create power proportional to the swept area of their blades. The choice of rotor attributes for a wind turbine, such as its diameter, is a design trade-off between longer blades for more energy production in low winds and shorter blades for load limitation in high winds. Thus, wind turbine having longer blades will increase the swept area, which in turn produces more power. However, at high wind speeds, a wind turbine having longer blades places greater demands on the components and creates more situations where the turbine must be shut down to avoid damaging components. Even in situations where the average wind speed is not high enough to cause damage, periodic wind gusts which change both the speed and direction of the wind, apply forces that may be strong enough to damage equipment.
In some wind turbine arrangements, deflectors are used to optimize wind turbine loading. Mounting of these deflectors can be difficult because of the amount of stress on the various components. Further, conventional mounting of the devices can involve machining parts for each particular use in order to correspond to the geometry of the airfoil at the location of mounting. Requiring a specific design for each part can be costly, time consuming and inefficient.